Doubtful. In the future, we'll all live in cramped and polluted high rise tenements that over look industrial feed lots of cattle that provide us a ration of meat and methane for fealty to MasterBlaster.

DarnoKonrad:Doubtful. In the future, we'll all live in cramped and polluted high rise tenements that over look industrial feed lots of cattle that provide us a ration of meat and methane for fealty to MasterBlaster.

Can someone explain to me how the MOOC/Coursera/etc thing makes much difference? We've already had lifetimes' worth of human learning free in textbooks in even the smallest libraries. Now, we add video lectures (though we've had those, free, for over 30 years too). Until employers start going, "you took 40 free online courses, paid $200 for some summative tests, and passed them... we'll totally count that as equal to a traditional B.S. Welcome to Initech!", I don't think we've really changed a whole lot.

I remember reading several years ago about a prototype mine that was shaped like a D20, and was covered with rocket motors. Every few seconds, a rocket motor would engage at random, sending the mine bounding off in a random direction until it hit something. It was rejected when it was found to attack friendly troops as often as the enemy. I'd like to see a fight between one of those and the wind-blown detonator.

born_yesterday:DarnoKonrad: Doubtful. In the future, we'll all live in cramped and polluted high rise tenements that over look industrial feed lots of cattle that provide us a ration of meat and methane for fealty to MasterBlaster.

Bob the Internet Barbarian:born_yesterday: DarnoKonrad: Doubtful. In the future, we'll all live in cramped and polluted high rise tenements that over look industrial feed lots of cattle that provide us a ration of meat and methane for fealty to MasterBlaster.

Counterpoint: we FINALLY get Thunderdome!

Or worse, Earth as it portrayed in Elysium.

The exoskeletons were cool.

There is still way to much land on earth that is sparsely populated for something like that to occur in the next hundredish years

born_yesterday:DarnoKonrad: Doubtful. In the future, we'll all live in cramped and polluted high rise tenements that over look industrial feed lots of cattle that provide us a ration of meat and methane for fealty to MasterBlaster.

snake_beater:born_yesterday: DarnoKonrad: Doubtful. In the future, we'll all live in cramped and polluted high rise tenements that over look industrial feed lots of cattle that provide us a ration of meat and methane for fealty to MasterBlaster.

snake_beater:born_yesterday: DarnoKonrad: Doubtful. In the future, we'll all live in cramped and polluted high rise tenements that over look industrial feed lots of cattle that provide us a ration of meat and methane for fealty to MasterBlaster.

Honest Bender:Designer Daan Roosegaarde thinks it's possible, by using induction coils buried in the road to charge cars as they drive

Leave engineering up to the engineers. This is such a retardedly stupid idea for multiple reasons. Cost aside, energy transfer via induction is terribly inefficient.

The vast majority of electricity is produced via induction in generators. The idea is still sounds stupid, but induction is the best we got for transferring mechanical to electrical energy. But yeah compared to direct conduction there are generally more losses for the transfer of electrical energy.

Cucullen:induction is the best we got for transferring mechanical to electrical energy.

*facepalm*That's not what we're talking about. We're talking about transferring electrical energy from the power grid into the battery of a moving car. It would be even more retarded to implement this plan with the intention of powering the electric motor(s) directly.

Honestly, if you really wanted to develop some sort of road-based electricity delivery system for electric cars, there are already much better ways to do it. I'll give you one example:

1) There are large scale sustainable power generation stations powering it. It's a terribly inefficient method for charging a battery and burning extra fossil fuels to power it would offset the efficiencies of scale that you get in large scale generation.

B - The cost to the consumer accounted for the efficiency loss so as to encourage charging at home which would be more efficient.

The reason being that the inability to make long road trips will kill the electric car as a primary car in most households and this would solve that

I predict in the future we will eat dinner with friends in taverns with food raised or grown on farms and cooked with fire. We will enjoy wines and cheeses, paying premiums for products whose production methods haven't changed in centuries.

From this list... City parks are tried and true. Cultures that have had grasshoppers will continue eating them, but I doubt it'll creep into other cultures except as an exotic dare. I've already been woken in the middle of the night by an amber alert text that my phone's supposedly "Do Not Disturb" mode had been overridden by our police state for, so I can see a tornado alert.

Inductor roads will never be practical, unless you come up with a new cheap conductor. The efficiency of induction suffers from an air gap. Maybe induction parking spaces to charge batteries.